Owning a Phone: Torch of Women's Lib in Bangladesh

A woman in South Asia was 37 percent less likely than a man to own a mobile phone — the world's worst telecom gender gap, according to the industry body GSMA. Traditional household economics were a large part of the explanation: when a family could afford one phone, it typically went to the husband; a second, if there was one, to the eldest son.

In October 2010, a new project set out to change that arithmetic. Called mWomen and backed publicly by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Cherie Blair, wife of former British prime minister Tony Blair, the initiative aimed to put mobile phones in the hands of 150 million women globally within three years through public-private partnerships. More than 20 major phone companies, including Nokia and Vodafone, signed on. The pitch combined development with commerce: closing South Asia's gap alone represented, in the GSMA's estimate, a $3.6 billion market opportunity — and mobile penetration was linked to GDP growth of 1.2 percent for every 10 percent increase in low-to-middle-income countries.

Bangladesh offered the clearest proof of concept. Grameen Phone, the telecom arm of the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen Bank, had since 1997 run its "village phone" program: poor rural women received loans to buy a phone, then charged fellow villagers for calls — earning a small income while putting their communities on the network. Hundreds of thousands of women had joined over the years, though cheaper handsets and falling call costs were beginning to make the model itself obsolete — a measure of its success.

Operators were learning that women were a market, not just a cause. Bangladesh's Banglalink had launched a "Ladies First" calling plan in 2005 and ran advertising aimed specifically at female customers — arguing, plainly, that it was good business.

The deeper story was what connectivity did for working women. In rural Bangladesh, phones let farmers call crop-information hotlines, report harvest problems, and take orders directly from buyers — collapsing distances that had long kept women producers at the mercy of middlemen. A phone was not just a convenience. For women on the economic margins, it was a distribution channel, a market, and a measure of independence.